You have heard the wailing and screaming about President Trump’s exit from the Paris Climate Accords, but do you understand that the agreement, never ratified by the U.S. government (NOT a treaty) accomplished nothing at all to modify or change the climate. The climate of the earth has been changing mildly for millions of years, and there is no unprecedented Global-Scale modern warming. The “Accords” were designed to transfer large amounts of wealth from the rich nations to the poor nations, ostensibly to allow them to save themselves from that non-existent unprecedented warming.

There are two kinds of climate science that we are dealing with. One is based on satellite measurements and thermometer readings and recorded history. The other is based on computer programs, based, I believe on computer programs that were designed to forecast what the financial markets were going to do. They took what they knew about the climate, and put that in, and they put in thermometer readings from weather stations all over our country and from around the world. There were problems with that because a lot of them were placed where concrete paving and buildings reflected heat, and some were next to air-conditioning outlets, others next to trash burners, so the readings weren’t all that useful. Then there are lots of things that they don’t understand completely, like the extent to which the warming from the sun is affected by clouds. Michael Mann conjured up, from his computer programs, what is called the hockey stick graph, which shows that the heating of the planet suddenly takes a sharp turn up.

Science doesn’t run on dramatic conclusions like that. Someone proposes an idea, and if many other scientists can examine the facts and test them and come up with the same conclusion over time, then they begin to trust the idea, and continue to test it all over again as new information comes in. Scientists are still finding many old conclusions that they thought were settled science, just are not.

During 2017, there were 150 graphs from 122 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals indicating modern temperatures are not unprecedented, unusual, or hockey-stick-shaped —nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability. We are a little over 4 months into the new publication year and already 81 graphs from 62 scientific papers undermine claims that modern era warming is climatically unusual.

Do follow the link and see some of the graphs. They come from all over the world, and illustrate natural variation. Here in Seattle we had snow on Christmas eve, just enough to make the trees look pretty, and that was it for the whole winter. A few cold days that it tried, without success, to snow. We’ve had years when we were essentially snowed in with icy streets, and we had one good sledding year on the hill in front of my house.

I make no pretense of being a scientist. But I grew up outdoors in the foothills of the Rockies, and I’ve been snowed in, flooded out, and even had the Union Pacific railroad derailed in my front yard. Sorry, no one is going to convince me that normal changes in the weather are a catastrophe.